AI Replaces Nearly 4,000 US Jobs in May

avatar
by Jacob Solomon Jun 5, 2023 News
AI Replaces Nearly 4,000 US Jobs in May

Let's make a big deal out of the "ai will replace humans in the workplace" argument.

According to a report by Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., 3,900 jobs were lost to artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence was listed as a reason for job cuts.

The reasons for job cuts include artificial intelligence.

  • Closing: 19,598
  • Market/economic conditions: 14,617
  • No reason provided: 12,914
  • Cost-cutting: 8,392
  • Voluntary severance/buyouts: 8,000
  • Restructuring: 5,215

A couple of months ago, resume builder released a survey that found nearly half of companies use artificial intelligence to replace workers More than half of the 1,000 US business leaders who responded to the survey said their companies have replaced workers with the Openai generative artificial intelligence chatbot.

There has been a surge in the number of workforce reductions in the United States. US-based employers announced 80,089 cuts in May, a 20% increase from the 66,995 cuts announced one month before. The January- May total is the highest since 2020. It's the highest total in the first five months of the year since 2009, when 822,283 cuts were tracked through May.

The technology sector announced the most cuts in May with 22,887, for a total of 136,831 this year, up 2% from the 4,503 cuts announced in the same period last year. Since 2001, when 168,395 cuts were announced for the whole year, the Tech sector has announced the most cuts.

Job openings are flattening, and consumer confidence is down. According to Andrew Challenger, labor expert and senior vice president of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc., companies appear to be putting the brakes on hiring.

There is a tool in the creative toolchest.

Are Marketing, Customer Experience Jobs Safe?

As a marketer or a customer experience leader, the question is how to keep my job safe. How can I show that I can do a better job than the other way around? How can I show that I can still support marketing campaigns, customer loyalty programs, and all other marketing initiatives?

It is important to know which jobs are most vulnerable to being lost to the generative artificial intelligence.

Some jobs are at risk of being replaced by artificial intelligence.

  • Tech jobs (Coders, computer programmers, software engineers, data analysts)
  • Media jobs (advertising, content creation, technical writing, journalism)
  • Legal industry jobs (paralegals, legal assistants)
  • Market research analysts
  • Teachers
  • Finance jobs (Financial analysts, personal financial advisers)
  • Traders
  • Graphic designers
  • Accountants
  • Customer service agents

There is enough gas here to make marketers worry. There are more than one list like that.

These are predictions. The Challenger, Gray and Christmas data shows that there are more than 3,900 jobs lost to artificial intelligence.

Hope for Marketers, Marketing AI Jobs

What will the future of marketing and customer experience look like? It's too early to say. There is not a lot of data on the impact of artificial intelligence.

It isn't all doom and gloom. The US Bureau of Labor and Statistics reported the creation of 339,000 jobs in May, well past the estimates of analysts.

There are signs that companies are embracing artificial intelligence and working side by side with marketers.

Some examples are provided.

  • Senior director of marketing, artificial intelligence. Intel last week posted a job looking for a “senior director of marketing, artificial intelligence.” It asks for “deep AI experience and the ability to collaborate effectively within large, matrixed organizations. They will be accountable for overseeing all AI marketing activities, including messaging, positioning, audience programs, demand generation, content development, social media, and sales enablement.”
  • Email marketing specialist with AI expertise. Upwork last week put out a job description that included the ability to:
    • Leverage AI tools, specifically ChatGPT, to create personalized and engaging email content
    • Create email templates and prompts to be used with GPT
    • Utilize AI for automation in your email campaigns
  • AI senior product manager. Coca Cola posted a position looking for an AI senior product manager who would be a “key contributor and influential role in the Human Insights and Marketing Performance (HI+MP) global team.” Responsibilities include:
    • Overseeing the development of AI-powered research tools and protocols
    • Identifying user needs, defining product requirements, and managing the development process
    • Developing and launching new tools and protocols products using AI technologies

Is the use of artificial intelligence going to make coders obsolete?

Hope for Customer Experience Professionals, CX AI Jobs

There is reason for hope. According to a poll released last month, customer experience/retention is the primary focus of generative artificial intelligence investments. Revenue growth, cost maximization, and business continuity were all in the top five.

There are signs that companies are investing in customer experience leaders to work with artificial intelligence.

Look at some of the titles in the job ads.

  • Customer engineer, AI/ML, Generative AI, Google Cloud. Google wants someone to work with technical sales teams as a machine learning subject matter expert to differentiate Google Cloud to customers and identify and assess customer Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine Learning (ML), or Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) opportunities to uncover cloud solutions to recommend, plan, and address core market opportunities and use cases.
  • Senior AI/ML special solutions architect, AWS. This customer-facing position is designed to enable large-scale customer use cases, design ML pipelines, and drive the adoption of AWS for the AI/ML platforms. The position will provide guidance on customer engagements, and develop white papers, blogs, reference implementations, and presentations to enable customers to fully leverage AI/ML on AWS.
  • Head of product, conversational AI for customer service, GotIt! This AI provider wants its head of product to establish product requirements and roadmap through engagement with customers, the executive team, sales/CX, marketing, R&D, design, and engineering teams, cross-functionally lead a diverse, global product and engineering team to ship a complex, advanced NLP product, work alongside sales and business development on strategic relationships with strategic distribution partners and coordinate and lead work streams across product, R&D, and solutions.

There will be marketing and customer experience jobs in the artificial intelligence market. According to a new report from Extrapolate, the global retail market for artificial intelligence will be worth $48.64 billion by 2032.

Despite the light-speed developments in artificial intelligence over the past half-year, many still think marketing jobs will stay intact.

The field of digital marketing depends on elements of imagination, creativity, and originality in finding ways to improve communication with clients according to Saurabh P. Digital marketing needs a human touch as well. It requires a certain amount of emotion and story telling in order for marketing to work today.

Do you have a tip to give us? We'd love to hear from you at editors@ cmswire.com.